BBC | ukwatch.net

Is Cameron cosying up to Murdoch?

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:07:57 +0000

After the revelation that during the August holidays David Cameron paid a hitherto secret visit to Rupert Murdoch’s yacht off the Greek Islands, there have been more tell-tale signs that the Conservative leader is cosying up to the Murdoch press. In a signed article for the Sun (3.11.2008), Cameron was firmly on message in a double-page spread: “Tory chief hits out — Bloated BBC out of touch with viewers”. Cameron hit all the right buttons: the licence fee should be reduced and the argument that the BBC needed to attract large audiences was “bogus”. But more importantly Cameron sided with Murdoch in arguing that the BBC should stop abusing its position by trying to compete with newspaper websites. Because of their heavy investment in online services — some of which are beginning to make money — it is essential from the Murdoch perspective that there should be no effective competition from the BBC. Cameron delivered just the line that he knew would appeal to Murdoch: “The squeezing and crushing of commercial competitors online or in publishing needs to be stopped”.

Nicholas Jones says Cameron and his communications director Andy Coulson (just named PR professional of 2008) need no lessons on how to woo the Murdoch press: Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell blazed that self same trail in the 1990s.

There is probably a questionable relationship between the government and news media in almost every country in the world. It might be blatant state control — outright censorship — where a government decides precisely what journalists can and cannot say. On the other hand there could be an equally manipulative arrangement which is not obvious to the public. It is these often hidden relationships which can be so insidious in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States of America where media proprietors are quite prepared to use their newspapers, radio and television stations — and now their websites — to exercise political patronage and to influence the outcome of elections.

Two disclosures in the past few days have revealed how these covert relationships can — and do — have a significant effect on the governance of Britain. The two disclosures are also further evidence of the lengths to which British politicians are prepared to go to win the support of Rupert Murdoch, editor in chief of a media empire which he says himself has become the “globe’s leading publisher of English-language newspapers”. The first example is a note of two hitherto secret conversations between Murdoch and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in January 1998 and July 2002. In the initial conversation the Prime Minister says he is “instinctively sympathetic” towards Murdoch’s plan to establish a new European interactive digital satellite television service. And in a follow-up conversation, Murdoch says in return his newspapers “would strongly support” the British government’s demand that Saddam Hussein should be required to destroy his weapons of mass destruction, press support which Blair was desperate to retain during the long build-up to the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Here we have a secret document which has only just been released under the Freedom of Information Act providing an open and shut illustration of collusion between a British Prime Minister and a media magnate. Blair is indicating that he will try to stop the European Commission blocking Murdoch’s latest television venture and the subsequent pay back is Murdoch promising Blair the support of his newspapers. These are not just any newspapers but include the two with the largest UK circulations (Sun 3.1 million and the Sunday News of the World 3.2 million). And when taken together with The Times and the equally influential Sunday Times, these four newspapers command a 42 per cent share of the national newspaper market.

The second equally significant disclosure of the last few days is that the Opposition leader David Cameron paid a hitherto secret visit to Rupert Murdoch’s luxury yacht when it was moored off the Greek islands during the August summer holidays. (“Cameron, Murdoch and the Greek island freebie” The Independent 24.10.2008) Again there could hardly be a more symbolic revelation as it indicates that the new Conservative leader is following exactly the same path which Blair took in trying to win the support of Murdoch’s newspapers.

What has to be understood is that Murdoch always wants — and needs to be — on the winning side, supporting the political party in power because in that way he can try to ensure maximum help from the government of the day for his vast commercial interests. Political beliefs are not always important. Murdoch has repeatedly switched sides in Australia just as he has in the United Kingdom. In the 1980s he was a staunch supporter of the then Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. But just before the general election in 1997, when it was clear the Conservatives under John Major were going to be defeated, he switched to Labour. Blair had flown to Australia to meet Murdoch and his executives at an island off Queensland, in the summer of 1995.

The switch in the allegiance of the Murdoch press was finally announced in three-inch high capital letters on the front page: “The Sun Backs Blair — give change a chance”(18.3.1997). Murdoch can sense the mood of political change which has been underway recently in Britain. There is no doubt that in recent months Prime Minister Gordon Brown has done a lot to re-establish his authority, aided by the comprehensive action which the British government has been taking to ease the current financial crisis. But the Conservatives still retain a significant lead in the opinion polls and last summer, when Murdoch played host to David Cameron, the Conservatives were even further ahead in popular opinion and everything pointed to the Opposition being well placed to win the general election which will have to be held by May 2010 at the latest.

This preparatory gear changing by the Murdoch press — perhaps switching from Labour back to the Conservatives — is being mirrored in the United States where Murdoch’s newspapers and television channels like Fox News — which have been such staunch supporters of the Republicans and George Bush — have been having to prepare for an Obama victory in the American Presidential Election. What Murdoch watchers and campaigners for media freedom are looking for are the tell-tale signs of a shift in press support. Therefore the revelation that David Cameron was Murdoch’s guest in August was significant because it is so reminiscent of Tony Blair’s mould-breaking trip to Australia to fraternise with Murdoch’s editors and executives.

Confirmation of Cameron’s trip only came about by chance as a result of investigations by journalists into precisely where leading British politicians spent their summer holidays and who gave them hospitality. This all became an issue after it emerged that a newly-appointed cabinet minister, the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson and the Conservatives’ shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had both been in Corfu as guests on board the yacht of the Russian aluminium oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. Both Mandelson and Osborne have suffered political damage but it could short term whereas there are more long-term implications from the Murdoch-Cameron meeting. The Conservatives’ impressive lead in the opinion polls is a reflection of an astute media strategy which has re-branded the party and projected Cameron as Prime Minister in waiting.

Much of this success has been due to the efforts of the Conservatives’ director of communications, Andy Coulson who was formerly editor of Murdoch’s largest selling UK newspaper, the News of the World and who has been named the PR professional of 2008 by PR Week. Coulson has been trying hard to reconnect the Conservatives with the editors and senior journalists of the Murdoch press. Coulson has been working just as assiduously as Alastair Campbell did in the mid 1990s when he wooed newspapers like the Sun and persuaded them to support Tony Blair. Campbell understood the mindset of the Sun’s journalists and he knew how to pitch stories and comment which would respond to the Sun’s agenda.

Coulson has demonstrated that same flair during the fall-out from the turmoil over the row about the misconduct of two of the BBC’s celebrity presenters, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Murdoch’s has been a long-term opponent of the BBC because of the enormous income it derives from the licence fee and the way it has been able to hold on to a commanding share of television audiences despite the advances being made by his own television services on the Sky satellite channel. The Sun and the News of the World have pursued with great vigour an anti-BBC story line, as witnessed again in their coverage of the BBC’s failure to control the sordid antics of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.

The News of the World’s front-page splash said it all : “BBC £14million Fat Cat Scandal” (2.11.2008) which revealed that fifty BBC executives earned more than the Prime Minister. The pay rates had been forced out of the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act. David Cameron, under the guidance of the Conservatives’ communications director, jumped in next day in the Sun with a full page article: “Bloated BBC out of touch with the viewers” writes David Cameron for the Sun (3.11.2008). Cameron was careful in his approach and insisted he was a “lifelong Conservative who is a fan of the BBC” but he was right on the button in supporting the Murdoch agenda of campaigning for the BBC to be cut down to size.

He said the BBC had become “bloated” with many of its executives overpaid; the licence fee should be reduced; and the argument that it needed to attract large audiences was “bogus”. But more importantly Cameron sided with Murdoch in arguing that the BBC should stop abusing its position by trying to compete with newspaper websites. Here we see the real bottom line for Murdoch. His newspapers are investing big time in their websites; some of their online services are making money; and therefore from the perspective of the Murdoch press it is essential that there should be no effective competition from the BBC. Cameron delivered just the line that he knew would appeal to Murdoch: “The squeezing and crushing of commercial competitors online or in publishing needs to be stopped”.

Cameron and Coulson need no lessons in how to woo the Murdoch press — Blair and Campbell blazed that precise trail in the 1990s and knew just how to appease such important commercial interests. The Blair government turned a blind eye to Murdoch’s cross media monopolies and stood on the sidelines when Sky was allowed to continue its near monopoly of televised Premier League football matches. The Brown government has been equally complicit in waving through the light-touch regulation of newspaper websites. Their audio-visual output is self regulated under the eye of the Press Complaints Commission.

Some newspapers are already offering online television services and come convergence and their ability to develop digital services, there is no doubt that Sun TV, Telegraph TV and a host of other innovative newspaper sites will have become serious competitors to the BBC. The closer the election gets, the more likely it will be that there will be further tell tale signs of the Murdoch press abandoning Labour. The recent release of the note about Murdoch’s two conversations with Blair gives a hint of the payback that David Cameron can expect.

Earlier disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act have confirmed that Blair had three telephone conversations with Murdoch in March 2003 in the lead-up to the Iraq War. After spending four years blocking the release of the details the government finally backed down the day after Blair resigned in July 2007.
All told, Blair had taken part in a total of six telephone discussions with Murdoch over a twenty month period. The three calls before the start of the American-led attack on Iraq took place within the space of nine days at a time when the Sun was unstinting in its support of Bush and Blair, praising the “courage and resilience” of the British Prime Minister. (Sun 20.3.2003). Despite the unpopularity in Britain of Blair’s support for George Bush in the war against Iraq, The Sun remained steadfast in its support of the Prime Minister and all four of the Murdoch newspapers urged readers to vote Labour in the 2005 general election.

Two front pages illustrate the closeness of that relationship. On the eve of the general election The Sun declared that it had got “deep down and personal with the Blairs” and the front-page headline, “Why Size Matters” (4.5.2005) led on to an inside spread which showed a tanned Prime Minister alongside some intimate quotes from his wife Cherie. In return for granting this titillating interview, The Sun repaid the compliment on polling day with a front page that urged readers to “Vote Labour Today” (5.5.2005). It showed the Prime Minister and the Chancellor dressed in red strips like Manchester United footballers and the headline said it all: “Come On You Reds” with Blair in the No.10 shirt and Gordon Brown as the No.11. Where The Sun’s support was so critical has been over the Iraq war and its consistent support for “Our Boys” or “The Lions of Basra” (4.9.2007) as they tended to be dubbed in Sun-speak.

The supposed invincibility of the British troops was encapsulated in the report over the arrival of the Black Watch regiment in Basra: “Watch it: Our Boys off to the battle zone. We beat Napoleon, Kaiser and Hitler…it’s just another job”. (25.10.2004). When the action switched to Afghanistan, there was the same Boy’s Own style of coverage when a reporter was sent to join troops on the front line: “The Sun takes on the Taliban” (9.10.2006). So the closeness of the link between politicians and media proprietors should never be overlooked and while there is no doubt that newspaper sales are declining at some speed, the owners are doing all they can, through their investment in websites, to ensure they retain their dominant position as news and information providers in the digital, online world.

Speech by Nicholas Jones to a delegation from Vietnamese Office of National Assembly, House of Lords, 5.11.2008

Propping up Propaganda

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:44:10 +0000

Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.

In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/ images/journals/lancet/ s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:

“Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005)

In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; ‘Update on Iraqi casualty data’, Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88)

In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:

“What a lot of balls … do you read the paper old friend? ... ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street…’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003)

Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:

“because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008)

The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.

Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.

Swooning Over The British Press

Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in “fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph” which “looks quite handsome”. Glover also liked the “much-improved Times”, while the “revamped Independent” positively “crackles with energy.” (Stephen Glover, ‘It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press’, the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of “the teleogens of Tharg”, Glover asked innocently, “Am I starry-eyed?”

Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:

“I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” (Stephen Glover, ‘Press were wrong on Iraq’, August 11, 2008)

But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, ‘No mea culpa from the British press’, August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849).

The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five.

The two Westerners who knew Iraq best – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the “genocidal” sanctions – were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)

The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the “supreme international crime”. If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery.

It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and “vibrancy” of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.

At the Guardian’s website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:

“... ‘the media’ is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers.” (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)

As this paragraph suggests, Greenslade has mastered the art of saying very little. He could have observed that news operations, the BBC and Guardian very much included, operate as platforms for established interests in society: corporations, business investors and warmongering Western leaders. But such obvious, real-world facts are not allowed to intrude. He added:

“Despite its scant resources, The Independent has played, and is playing, a part in keeping the media honest.”

It is a bold judgement, one that can be made only by ignoring the actual content of the Independent’s media coverage. More crucially, it also overlooks what the paper reports, and does not report, in its news and business sections. In the age of the internet – when honest, non-corporate news sources are readily accessible – it is becoming ever harder to ignore the evidence before our own eyes.

Green Alliance – A Spin Profile

This Alice-in-Wonderland quality extends to the publicly funded BBC whose output regularly contravenes its own guidelines on “impartiality”, “balance” and a stated commitment “to reflect a wide range of opinion.” Consider a recent BBC online piece which proclaimed:

“Green groups have welcomed the creation of a new energy and climate department in Gordon Brown’s government reshuffle.” (Mark Kinver, ‘Greens welcome new climate department’, October 3, 2008;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/sci/tech/7650669.stm)

Which “Green groups” were these? Well, the only group cited was the Green Alliance, which describes itself as “an independent organisation” but which, in fact, has close links with both government and big business. (Source Watch; http://www.sourcewatch.org/ index.php?title=Green_Alliance)

The BBC report quoted Green Alliance director Stephen Hale:

“Hallelujah. A department of energy and climate change, and not before time… The new department puts climate change where it belongs, with its own seat at the cabinet table.”

The BBC was here taking us deep into Orwell territory. Hale was a special adviser to Margaret Beckett when she was Secretary of State for the Environment. The most recently available accounts indicate that Green Alliance has received funding from a range of sources which include government departments: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Department for International Development. (Green Alliance Trust accounts for year ending 31 March, 2007; http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/ uploadedFiles/About_Us/FinalAccounts0607(1).pdf)

Funding and support for Green Alliance have also come from centres of green activism like BP, Glaxo, Lever Brothers, Shell, the BBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tarmac and the privatised utilities. (SpinProfiles, http://www.spinprofiles.org/ index.php/Green_Alliance; website to be launched in November 2008)

As the excellent new online resource SpinProfiles says: “Green Alliance looks like an enormously powerful corporate lobby heavily connected to the political forces that have reshaped the globe since the late 1970s.” (Ibid.)

In his BBC report, Kinver did also cite the Sustainable Development Commission. But this is hardly a “green group” as readers would normally understand the term. After all, as Kinver noted, it was set up by the government to which it reports.

All of this makes a nonsense of the headline, leading paragraph and thrust of the BBC piece about environmentalists supposedly applauding the creation of the new department. The BBC’s analysis, as ever, failed to mention the small matter of the government’s lamentable record in tackling the climate crisis, and that this latest initiative has as much substance as previous government assertions of “joined-up thinking.”

Lack of space cannot account for failures of this kind: they occur too consistently right across the BBC’s copious broadcasts and webpages. When asked, “Why can’t the BBC do better than this?”, Mark Kinver responded:

“I did contact the main green groups in the UK (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF) for their reaction to the news of the formation of the new department. All welcomed the move by Gordon Brown to use his reshuffle to bring the energy and environment portfolios under one departmental roof.

“However, I did not include direct quotes from these organisations because I balanced the left-leaning Green Alliance’s views with the comments from the free-market think-tank, Policy Exchange (their positions were illustrated by the direct quotes I used in the story).

“Because the reshuffle was a change within the Whitehall village, rather than a change of government policy, I felt that the most appropriate comments were from organisations that operated within that sphere – hence quotes from the Green Alliance, Policy Exchange, CBI [Confederation of British Industry] and SDC [the Sustainable Development Commission].”

Longstanding readers of our alerts may recall that we have sometimes highlighted the moribund state, and lack of radical vision, of the main green groups, notably Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (e.g. ‘Silence is Green’, February 3, 2005).

And we have truly gone down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole when a BBC journalist can describe the Green Alliance as “left-leaning.” The editorial commitment to “a wide range of opinion” is equally surreal when quotes are restricted to elite groups within the “sphere” of “the Whitehall village.” Finally, the BBC’s notion of “impartiality” is exemplified in the “balance” in the piece between the corporate-leaning Green Alliance and the even more rabidly corporate “free-market think tank”, Policy Exchange.

Readers can cast their minds back to New Labour’s ascension to power in 1997 when there was similar optimistic talk of “joined-up” government. Back then, John Prescott’s “super-ministry” was sold to the British public as a great innovation taking responsibility for transport, environment and the regions of the UK. The Independent told its readers that Prescott, a “blunt Northerner”, “regards himself as a moderniser and a man with ideas. He is restless for power, and is likely to turn his office into one of the engine-rooms of the Blair government.” (‘Blair’s magnificent seven: the new cabinet takes shape’, The Independent, May 3, 1997; no byline)

The Observer’s Patrick Wintour assured us that Prescott was a “policy wonk” who was “willing to address policy challenges without prejudice. His record in campaigning on green issues stretches back to long before they became fashionable.” (Patrick Wintour, ‘Five challenges to forge a better Britain: action on the environment’, The Observer, May 11, 1997)

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott announced breathlessly in the early days of the New Labour regime:

“The first fortnight of the Blair administration has proved one thing: Labour may not be as red as it once was, but it is one hell of a lot greener. One of the beneficial spin-offs of modernisation is that the obsession with growth at all costs has been ditched.” (Larry Elliott, ‘Labour’s moral mission: going from red to green with a pollution solution. Environment has moved centre stage in a new government that sees protecting the world as good business and good politics’, The Guardian, May 19, 1997)

More than a decade later and we are supposed to perceive the latest recarving of Whitehall departments as a bold move that will really get to grips with the terrifying threat of climate chaos. We are supposed to believe the prime minister will perform a massive U-turn away from corporate priorities, as the Guardian insists he must:

“Mr Brown must now prove that he is prepared to treat an ailing climate with an injection of political capital to match the vast dose of financial capital he was so willing to invest in the banks.” (Leader article, ‘The greening of Brown’, the Guardian, October 20, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/oct/20/ leader-climate-carbon-gordon-brown)

The required suspension of disbelief is truly farcical. Meanwhile, the world’s life-support systems are continuing to collapse under rapidly escalating global financial and industrial exploitation.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Stephen Glover, media commentator, the Independent
Email: scmgox@aol.com

Roy Greenslade, media commentator, the Guardian
Email: roy.greenslade@mac.com

Mark Kinver, BBC reporter
Email: mark.kinver@bbc.co.uk

Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org

This media alert is archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/081022_propping_up_brutal.php

The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. For details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

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Arms trade plus comedy on the BBC??

Alex Doherty — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:35:06 +0000

CAAT media volunteer Todd Higgs spoke to ‘Safety Catch’ writer Laurence Howarth, whose arms trade-based sitcom was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 2007.

What prompted you to write a sitcom set around the arms trade?

I got to thinking about how people relate to their jobs, and of people generally having a job but disowning it. I thought, is it possible to have
somebody who thinks he’s a nice person – which the main character does – and yet have a job like this. Would this create a comic tension?
Every day he has to find ways of justifying it to himself: having to use all those excuses, because I think when people within the industry talk
about it I think what they’re offering is not reasons but justifications and the sort of excuses that are along the lines of things that we all do. It has
this stark dramatic backdrop, but also it stands for a lot of things about ourselves we don’t like. There are also some aspects of his character
that I hope people do sympathise with.

Are any of the arms industry stories in the show based on real events?

One of the things I wanted to do with the arms trade side of it was to try and make it as close to how I would imagine it would be. So there
is a character called Boris who is sort of more a cartoon character who thinks that everyone should have a gun. I wanted him to be like an arms
dealer. There are often little satirical references to some of the more famous deals through Boris, things like ‘Saudi Arabian Princes don’t
bribe themselves you know’. But even if the attitudes are caricatures in some ways, I think the industry itself is portrayed fairly accurately. I
thought it was my responsibility to do that.

What was your individual take on the BAE/Saudi Arabia/SFO saga?

I was writing something dramatic, so in a way I didn’t want my view to be in there. This is about how a person with weak beliefs accounts for
himself. My own view about the trade, the more I look at it, is that it’s one of the great human scandals. I’d like to think that in 200 years time
we’ll look back on the arms trade as we look back now on slavery. And so, in retrospect, I think organisations like Amnesty and CAAT are
absolutely right, for the sake of humanity, to do what they do. I felt that I wanted people to know about this world.

To perhaps lead them to the door but let them open it?

Yeah. I think perhaps one of the things that struck me when I was researching was what a huge industry it is and how when you say
‘the arms industry’ to a lot of people they think of something that happens somewhere else. It’s huge, such a big thing.

Are there any plans for another series of ‘Safety Catch’?

We’re doing another series of six episodes for the radio in February next year, and I’m writing a TV pilot script at the moment. The reviews
were very good. There were some people who really didn’t like it, who felt that you shouldn’t do comedy about this. I think there’s no reason
why comedy shouldn’t tackle big questions. I’d really like to do it on TV; on radio you can’t quite jolt people with the reality of it in the
same way but visually it’s a lot easier to do that. People choose not to imagine. Whether that will happen is a long way off but it’s a very
intriguing challenge.

Intellectual Cleansing: Part 1

Ellie Keen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:11:27 +0000

Keeping The Media Safe For Big Business

Martin Tierney is one of a tiny number of mainstream journalists willing to review our book, ‘Guardians of Power’. In June 2006, he published an accurate outline of our argument in the Herald, commenting: "It stands up to scrutiny."

He added that we "do not see conscious conspiracy but a ‘filter system maintained by free market forces.’ After all it wouldn’t be appropriate to show the limbs of third world children during Thanksgiving as it would only remind consumers who was really being stuffed." (http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/review_herald.php)

Exactly so. But if no conspiracy is involved, how on earth does the market manage to filter dissident views with such consistency? As baffled Channel 4 news reader, Jon Snow, told us:

"Well, I’m sorry to say, it either happens or it doesn’t happen. If it does happen, it’s a conspiracy; if it doesn’t happen, it’s not a conspiracy." (Interview with David Edwards, January 9, 2001; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/interviews/jon_snow.php)

In 1996, Noam Chomsky attempted to explain to an equally bemused Andrew Marr (then of the Independent):

Marr: "This is what I don’t get, because it suggests – I mean, I’m a journalist – people like me are ‘self-censoring’..."

Chomsky: "No – not self-censoring. There’s a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through and – it doesn’t work a hundred percent, but it’s pretty effective – it selects for obedience and subordination, and especially…"

Marr: "So, stroppy people won’t make it to positions of influence…"

Chomsky: "There’ll be ‘behaviour problems’ or… if you read applications to a graduate school, you see that people will tell you ‘he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues’ – you know how to interpret those things."

Chomsky’s key point:

"I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting." (The Big Idea, BBC2, February 14, 1996; http://www.aithne.net/index. php?e=news&id=4&lang=0)

So what happens when a professional journalist does express "something different"? Is their office seat just yanked away from them and rolled under a more reliable rear end?

Consider the case of our reviewer, Martin Tierney, who wrote for the Saturday Herald for seven years. In August, Tierney reviewed Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Going To Extremes (Granta, 2008). With his usual uncompromising vim, he wrote:

"It is essentially a tirade against every method used against US citizens to ensure that their wealth is systematically transferred to government and corporate elites.

"This is done, she claims, via abuse of the tax system, scapegoating immigrants; denial of Unions and Gestapo tactics used by the likes of… [a large US supermarket] to ensure this and a perennial ‘Warfare State’ where taxpayers money merely is used to enrich arms dealers while bludgeoning them into a unnecessary paranoia."

Notice that Tierney merely reported claims made by Ehrenreich in her book regarding the use of "Gestapo tactics". It seems the Herald’s initial response to the review was positive – the piece was excellent, he was told. (Email to Media Lens, September 25, 2008)

But someone else on the Herald’s editorial staff informed Tierney that the reference to the supermarket’s "Gestapo tactics" had caused great upset and anger in the office. One senior editor in particular was deeply unamused. This last reaction appears to have been decisive. Indeed, as a result, Tierney was told, he was being asked to relinquish his column. The reasoning? His editor felt she could not feel confident that he would not make similarly extreme comments in future – comments that might slip undetected into the paper. (Email from Tierney to Media Lens, October 1, 2008)

The reference to a lack of confidence immediately recalls the work of journalist and physicist Jeff Schmidt who has studied the filtering of career professionals in some depth. The professional, Schmidt explains, "is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorise, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today’s most highly educated employees is no accident." (Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000, p.16)

The question of trust is crucial – employers must be able to rely on their human property to play by the rules. This is why Tierney was fired.

The employer’s reference to Tierney’s extreme comment was ironic indeed given the extreme nature of the horrors exposed in Ehrenreich’s book – titled, after all, Going To Extremes – and outlined in Tierney’s review.

Tierney tells us the review was published – with the unamusing mention of the US supermarket, and all references to it, removed – on August 16. (Email from Tierney to Media Lens September 30, 2008)

If you’ve ever wondered why the press finds it so hard to find ‘space’ for the multitude of excellent, radical analyses, this incident gives an idea of the true reasons. The unwritten corporate media rule is that you can say what you like about the powerless – they can be treated with contempt, smeared and slandered without limit. But when the powerless attempt to challenge the powerful, a different rule applies.

By contrast, in May, the mighty Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, had no problems attacking the BBC in a Times article titled, ‘Watch out, the Gestapo are about.’
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3933535.ece)

Butler was not merely reporting an accusation of "Gestapo tactics", as Tierney did; he was himself protesting a BBC advert that sought to scare viewers into paying their licence fees. Butler commented:

"Nor are these Gestapo tactics new. Years ago, similar advertisements showed a family laughing at some comedy programme on TV. Comes the voice-over: ‘If you have a TV licence, you’re laughing.’ In the dimly-lit street, a van draws up. Black leather boots crunch up the path, the family still oblivious. The voice continues: ‘If not…’ A gloved hand presses the bell. Suddenly, the family stops laughing, their faces gripped by sheer dread."

You can bet there was no great upset in the Times’ offices.

In July 2007, Ned Temko and Nicholas Watt of the Observer reported that the wife of Downing Street’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, had "lifted the lid on the private fury felt by Tony Blair’s inner circle over the cash-for- peerages inquiry, accusing the police of ‘Gestapo tactics’." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ politics/2007/jul/22/uk.partyfunding)

Imagine the shock if Temko and Watt had been sacked for reporting the accusation.

In September 2006, Dominic Lawson wrote an article titled, ‘Gestapo tactics in freedom’s name.’ Protesting the US-UK use of torture in fighting "the war on terror", Lawson wrote:

"America is inevitably tainted – and Britain by association – with the unanswerable charge that it has used the tactics of the Gestapo in the name of freedom." (http://www.independent.co.uk/ opinion/commentators/dominic- lawson/dominic-lawson-gestapo- tactics-in-freedoms-name-415613.html)

Samantha’s Christmas Cards – And Other Scandals

All around us, unseen, our media are being continuously cleansed, pore-deep, of important rational comments for the simple, crude reason that they threaten profits.

Last month, Nick Clayton, a columnist at the Scotsman for 12 years and formerly its technology editor, reported that advertisers were leaving the paper in favour of online media. He wrote: "Whether you’re looking for work or a home, the web’s the place to go."

Clayton was fired for writing this. He commented on his sacking:

"I really don’t understand why I’ve been fired… I was merely reporting what estate agents had said to me about advertising in newspapers." (http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=42095)

Freelancers aren’t fired, just waved away. Last month, Greg Philo of the prestigious Glasgow University Media Group submitted a powerful article, ‘More News Less Views’, to the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) website. Philo wrote:

"News is a procession of the powerful. Watch it on TV, listen to the Today programme and marvel at the orthodoxy of views and the lack of critical voices. When the credit crunch hit, we were given a succession of bankers, stockbrokers and even hedge-fund managers to explain and say what should be done. But these were the people who had caused the problem, thinking nothing of taking £20 billion a year in city bonuses. The solution these free market wizards agreed to, was that tax payers should stump up £50 billion (and rising) to fill up the black holes in the banking system. Where were the critical voices to say it would be a better idea to take the bonuses back?

"Mainstream news has sometimes a social-democratic edge. There are complaints aired about fuel poverty and the state of inner cities. But there are precious few voices making the point that the reason why there are so many poor people is because the rich have taken the bulk of the disposable wealth. The notion that the people should own the nation’s resources is close to derided on orthodox news." (http://www.medialens.org/ forum/viewtopic.php?p=9838#9838)

He added:

"At the start of the Iraq war we had the normal parade of generals and military experts, but in fact, a consistent body of opinion then and since has been completely opposed to it. We asked our sample [of TV viewers] whether people such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein and Michael Moore should be featured routinely on the news as part of a normal range of opinion. Seventy three per cent opted for this rather than wanting them on just occasionally, as at present."

Matt Seaton, the CiF editor, rejected the article on the grounds that "it would be read as a piece of old lefty whingeing about bias". (Email from Greg Philo, September 30, 2008)

This from the same website that has just published Anne Perkins’s analysis of the merits of different leaders’ wives. Sarah Brown, wife of prime minister Gordon, and Samantha Cameron, wife of Tory leader David, are doing so much better than "that awful Cherie" Blair, it seems:

"Brown is unflashy and sincere. Cameron is cool and elegant. The joke is they could be sisters, with pretty but unacademic Samantha and the older, not quite as pretty but dead brainy Sarah." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/oct/01/cherieblair.women)

Samantha "keeps her mouth shut and looks cool and stylish", although there have been gaffes: "no one mentions those packs of Smythson’s Christmas cards (£5.70 each, £57 for 10)". And so on…

We found this within seconds of visiting the site – there are limitless comparable examples. At time of writing, Perkins’s article has garnered 15 uninspired comments, including: "It is a very silly Daily Mail sort of article as others say, but this is the way the Guardian is going, alas."

As we ourselves know, where dissidents can’t be sacked, patronised or ignored, legal action is always an option.

CanWest, one of Canada’s largest media companies, is the owner of newspapers, radio and television stations, and online properties. CanWest founder, Israel (Izzy) Asper, a strong supporter of Israel’s right-wing Likud party, reportedly told the Jerusalem Post:

"In all our newspapers, including the National Post, we have a very pro-Israel position… we are the strongest supporter of Israel in Canada." (http://www.zcommunications.org/ znet/viewArticle/18899)

The Guardian noted that Asper "was highly critical of any perceived anti-Israeli position in the media, particularly the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of the Middle East, which he suggested had anti-Semitic overtones". (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news /2003/oct/16/guardianobituaries)

Responding to this consistent pro-Israeli stance, the Palestine Media Collective produced a satirised version of CanWest’s Vancouver Sun newspaper on the theme of the 40th anniversary of the Israeli Occupation in 2007. This included stories such as: "Study Shows Truth Biased against Israel, By CYN SORSHEEP." (http://redstaterebels.org/2008/09/ profits-and-free-speech-in-Canada/)

In response, CanWest hit the media collective with a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) claiming a violation of trademark law. Because the writers were initially anonymous, CanWest sued the printer and another activist, Mordecai Briemberg, who had passed out copies. Robert Jensen, professor of journalism at the University of Texas, takes up the story:

"Such a suit is legitimate only when the plaintiff can show there’s a reasonable likelihood that people will confuse the fake with the real and that some harm will result. In this case, there clearly is no confusion and no harm, and hence no serious claim. But CanWest presses on.

"Calling the [Palestine Media] Collective’s paper ‘a counterfeit version’ that amounts to ‘identity theft,’ CanWest seems to want to frame this as a kind of intellectual-property terrorism: ‘This piece was not satirical. It was not a clever spoof. It was a deliberate act to mislead and misinform thousands of people by using the actual Vancouver Sun masthead, logo and layout," reads a company statement on the case." (Jensen, (http://www.zcommunications.org/ znet/viewArticle/18899)

Briemberg initially sought coverage of his plight from the Canadian press without success. He then approached the international press, including the Guardian, with an opinion piece. The Guardian directed him to their Comment is Free website, which has ignored him.

The Index Censorship has run an edited version of his op-ed here: http://www.indexoncensorship.org/?p=560

A Seriously Free Speech Committee has also been formed to help with honorary members such as Naomi Klein, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, and many others: http://seriouslyfreespeech.wordpress.com/

There has so far been no mention of this story in any UK newspaper.

Part 2 will follow shortly…

Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us:
Email: editor@medialens.org

This media alert will shortly be archived here:
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Israel shuts down BBC in Hebron

tim — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:38:36 +0000

The IDF shut down BBC radio transmitters in Hebron on Wednesday, acting on orders of the Communications Ministry and citing interference with communications at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

The IDF Spokesman said the transmitters were illegal, adding that the Communications Ministry had found them to be jeopardizing contact between Ben-Gurion’s control tower and passenger aircraft.

BBC employees had raised the issue during a press conference held by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Wednesday. A government official said in response that in addition to the BBC’s transmitters, a number of additional transmitters had been shut down, including some inside Israel, as they were “endangering civilian aviation, a problem we have been suffering from for a long time.”

The official added that the BBC was broadcasting on a wavelength allocated to it by the Palestinian Authority without prior coordination with the Communications Ministry. “We are now trying to solve the problem,” the official said.

In a statement, the BBC confirmed that its “FM broadcasts in the city of Hebron ceased late yesterday morning. The BBC understands that the Israeli Ministry of Communication instructed contractors, accompanied by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), to visit the transmission site and confiscate a transmitter and other equipment. We understand there were similar visits to two other private stations in the vicinity.”

The BBC added that it had had “no contact from the Israeli authorities relating to aircraft interference resulting from our FM broadcasts since broadcasts started in Hebron in March this year. The BBC has implemented technical protocols to prevent interference from its broadcasts, however there are any number of factors that could produce interference.

“We have requested that our equipment be returned immediately. We are now in discussion with the Israeli authorities and are aiming to resolve this matter as soon as possible.”

Some Matter More

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:13:59 +0000

When 47 victims are worth 43 words

Bad Form

In his classic work, Obedience to Authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram observed:

"There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the ‘final solution’, it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings." (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.204)

The same "bad form" is very much discouraged in our own society. One would hardly guess from media reporting that Britain and America are responsible for killing anyone in Iraq and Afghanistan, where violence is typically blamed on "insurgents" and "sectarian conflict". International "coalition" forces are depicted as peacekeepers using minimum violence as a last resort.

In reporting the November 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by US troops, Newsweek suggested that the scale of the tragedy "should not be exaggerated". Why?

"America still fields what is arguably the most disciplined, humane military force in history, a model of restraint compared with ancient armies that wallowed in the spoils of war or even more-modern armies that heedlessly killed civilians and prisoners." (Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson, ‘Probing Bloodbath,’ Newsweek, June 12, 2006; http://www.newsweek.com/id/52312/page/1)

The truth was revealed in a single moment of unthinking honesty by a senior US Army commander involved in planning the November 2004 Falluja offensive and convinced of its necessity. He visited the city afterward and declared:

"My God, what are the folks who live here going to say when they see this?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ weekinreview/04burns.html?fta=y&pagewanted=all)

The answer was provided by physician Mahammad J. Haded, director of an Iraqi refugee centre, who was in Falluja during the US onslaught:

"The city is today totally ruined. Falluja is our Dresden in Iraq… The population is full of rage." (http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-awad100305.htm)

In July 2005, the Independent commented on US actions in Iraq:

"The American army’s use of its massive fire-power is so unrestrained that all US military operations are in reality the collective punishment of whole districts, towns and cities." (Patrick Cockburn, ‘We must avoid the terrorist trap,’ The Independent, July 11, 2005)

In April 2004, the Daily Telegraph reported the disgust of senior British army commanders in Iraq with the "heavy-handed and disproportionate" military tactics used by US forces, who view Iraqis "as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life… their attitude toward the Iraqis is tragic, it is awful." (Sean Rayment, ‘US tactics condemned by British officers’, Defence Correspondent, Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2004)

Burying The Bride

The anonymous commanders’ comments generalise to both British and American media reporting.

In July, Afghan investigators in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, told the AFP news agency that they had been shown the "bloodied clothes of women and children" killed in a July 6 US air strike. The attack was reported to have killed 47 civilian members of a wedding party, including 39 women and children, with nine wounded. The head of the team, Burhanullah Shinwari, deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s senate, said: "They were all civilians and had no links with Taliban or Al-Qaeda." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5joXBRRzFwxSG_I-Ucf34VMr379hQ)

Around ten people were reported still missing, believed buried under rubble. It is now estimated that 52 people were killed – the same number that died in the London suicide attacks of July 7, 2005. Another member of the team, Mohammad Asif Shinwari, said there were only three men among the dead and the rest were women and children. Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire reports that eight of the victims were between 14 and 18 years of age. (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/ Anotherweddingpartymassacre_July62008.html). The US military initially claimed only "militants" involved in mortar attacks had been killed.

A separate investigation into a July 4 strike in the northeastern province of Nuristan found that 17 civilians had been killed there. The coalition claimed they had killed several militants who were fleeing after attacking a base. But an Afghan official again confirmed that the victims were "all civilians." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5joXBRRzFwxSG_I-Ucf34VMr379hQ) Afghan authorities said the dead included two doctors and two midwives who had been attempting to leave the area to escape military operations.

Air Force Times reports that allied warplanes are currently dropping a record number of bombs on Afghanistan. For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs – more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total. But this only hints at the true extent of the slaughter. The figures do not include cannon rounds shot by fighters or AC-130 gunships, Hellfire and other small rockets launched by warplanes and drones, and assaults by helicopters. Air Force Times comments:

"In close-quarter firefights where friendly soldiers could be wounded if bombs are used, cannon fire and missiles are often the preferred alternative." (Bruce Rolfsen, ‘Afghanistan hit by record number of bombs,’ Air Force Times, July 18, 2008;
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news /2008/07/airforce_bomb_oef_071708/)

The response of the UK press to these latest atrocities is a case study in censorship by omission.

On July 12, the Guardian devoted 307 words to the attack on the wedding party. The killing of 39 women and children was not considered front page news – the story was buried on page 30. (Mohammad Rafiq Jalalabad, ‘US air strike killed 47 civilians, says Afghan government,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008)

On the same day, a 490-word article in the Times focused on the fate of nine British troops injured when a US helicopter accidentally targeted them in a "friendly fire" incident. Six of the nine soldiers have since returned to duty, with three still receiving medical treatment. While 447 words were devoted to this story, the article concluded with two sentences totalling 43 words on the killing of the Afghan civilians:

"However, 47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, an Afghan government investigation has concluded. The nine-man investigation team found that only civilians were hit during the airstrike." (Dominic Kennedy and Michael Evans, ‘Friendly fire inquiry to investigate messages from troops,’ The Times, July 12, 2008)

At time of writing there have been five mentions of the 47 deaths in UK national quality newspapers.

Media reports on Western victims of terrorist or insurgent attacks typically provide detailed information on the names, backgrounds and personal histories of the victims. When the first female British soldier, Sarah Bryant, was killed in Afghanistan on June 17, the media poured forth details about her life. The BBC website showed pictures of Bryant’s wedding and devoted an article to moving tributes from her husband, father, mother, commanding officer, unit commander, friends and colleagues. A friend of the family described Bryant: "A hundred per cent feminine, very pretty, very unassuming, a natural person, very happy – the sort of person that when she was in a room, it lit up." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/uk_news/7463470.stm)

Bryant, recall, was a combatant. The depth of focus changes for Iraqi and Afghan non-combatant victims of US-UK violence. In a BBC online article, Martin Patience reported the July 6 attack:

"Regional officials said the casualties were attending a wedding party and that the bride had been killed." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7502137.stm)

We wrote to Patience (July 14), noting that he had reported that the bride had been among the victims. We asked him why he had not mentioned that fully 39 of the victims were women and children. He responded:

"I accept your point about not mentioning women and children, although, in my defence, the story was linked to the new story and I didn’t necessarily want to repeat the details." (Email to Media Lens, July 14)

We wrote back:

"Thanks for your response, I appreciate it. But something doesn’t add up. How often did the media provide us with the personal details – name, gender, photo, education, work lives, loved ones, aspirations – of the victims of the July 7 bomb attacks in London? [See here: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/ uk/05/london_blasts/victims/default.stm] The July 6 atrocity in Afghanistan has been reported a tiny handful of times in the press. Why would you be concerned about repeating the fact that almost all of the victims were women and children?" (Email, July 14)

We received no further reply but, to its credit, the BBC did subsequently publish an excellent piece on the July 6 attack: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7504574.stm

Patience had earlier reported: "the latest claim of civilian casualties puts yet more pressure on the Afghan authorities and international forces to get it right when carrying out operations." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7492195.stm)

The reference to the need for "international forces" to "get it right" might sound like neutral language. But imagine if a journalist had commented in August 1990 that claims of civilian casualties had put "yet more pressure on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi forces to get it right when carrying out operations in Kuwait." The bias suddenly becomes very clear.

Militants And Mistakes

On July 12, Leonard Doyle of the Independent reported:

"The UN said last month that nearly 700 Afghan civilians had lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, about two-thirds in attacks by militants and about 255 in military operations." (Doyle, ‘US to investigate air strike that killed 47 Afghan civilians,’ The Independent, July 12, 2008)

From this, we were presumably to understand that the "militants" are not conducting "military operations", and Afghan government/"coalition" forces conducting "military operations" are not "militants".

The point being that "militant" is a pejorative term used by journalists to suggest illegitimacy. In June 1999, the BBC reported that "Kosovo Albanians have been welcoming the return of armed KLA soldiers." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/369239.stm) KLA insurgents fighting Serbian forces were supported by the West and were regularly described as "soldiers" rather than "militants" or "insurgents". The British media have similarly referred to the "Chechen resistance" fighting the Russian army. Ironically, British and American journalists also commonly referred to Afghan forces fighting the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as "resistance fighters" and "freedom fighters" (See our media alert: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/ 07/071120_invasion_a_comparison.php). The use of such terms is of course inconceivable in US-UK reporting of the current occupation.

On the rare occasions when US-UK atrocities are discussed, they are invariably described as blunders rather than crimes. On July 13, Alastair Leithead commented on the BBC’s evening news:

"It’s these mistakes that cost the US the support of the [Afghan] people."

In September 2004, the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell reported on BBC TV news from Baghdad:

"As is so often the case in this conflict it’s the Iraqi civilian population which suffers the greatest loss of life – either as a result of mistakes by the Americans, or, far more frequently, of course, as a result of the bombs and the bullets of the insurgents." (Witchell, BBC1, 18:00 News, September 30, 2004)

The bias could hardly be more transparent – we kill civilians only by "mistake", our enemies do not. Noam Chomsky comments:

"The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries." (Noam Chomsky, ‘Terrorists wanted the world over.’ February 26, 2008; http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174899)

As Chomsky notes we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. When Israel’s High Court authorised intense collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity, when Bill Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998 in Sudan supplying half the country’s drugs, and when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, the devastating consequences for civilians were predictable, but ignored.

Certainly it is reprehensible to kill with intent. But is it any better to kill without intent when the likely consequences for our victims are so irrelevant that they do not even enter our minds? The point being, as Chomsky writes, that Western elites really do appear to regard Third World peoples "much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration." (Ibid)

When we assemble the different pieces of the media jigsaw puzzle, clear patterns emerge. Western victims are presented as real, important people with names, families, hopes and dreams. Iraqi and Afghan victims of British and American violence are anonymous, nameless. They are depicted as distant shadowy figures without personalities, feelings or families.

The result is that Westerners are consistently humanised, while non-Westerners are portrayed as lesser versions of humanity.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Martin Patience
Email: martin.patience@bbc.co.uk

Write to Leonard Doyle
Email: l.doyle@independent.co.uk

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BBC's Pro-Israeli Bias

Ellie Keen — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:50:19 +0000

In its near 86 year history, BBC has a long, unbroken and dubious distinction. Today it’s little different from its corporate-run counterparts in America, Britain and throughout the world. In fact, on its tailored for a US BBC America audience, what passes for news matches stride for stride what people here see every day – mind-numbing commercialism, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, celebrity and sports features, and other diverting and distracting non-news that should embarrass correspondents and presenters delivering it. It offends viewers and treats them like mushrooms – well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about the most important world and national issues affecting their lives and welfare.

That’s the idea, of course, and has been since BBC’s inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: “(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial.” BBC never was and never is.

Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about “honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure.” How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task

- to function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” On all vital issues – war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East’s longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is “reliable” – pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.

This article covers one example among many – BBC’s distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it’s fully in step with its American and European counterparts – Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don’t; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC’s coverage exacerbates it.

Key BBC Terms In Its Israeli – Palestinian Coverage

In October 2006, Electronic Intifada.net listed BBC’s “key terms” in its conflict coverage – to “find a balance” that, in fact, tilts strongly toward Israel.

For example:

— pre-meditated assassinations are called “killings” or occasionally “targeted killings” if Israeli sources say it;

— the separation or apartheid wall is called a “barrier, separation barrier, West Bank barrier, (or simply) this wall;” sometimes “fence” is used as well; no hint of its real purpose or that the World Court ruled it illegal; no mention either that it’s unrelated to security and simply a land-grab scheme and effort to heighten Palestinian isolation;

— East Jerusalem – BBC recognizes West Jerusalem as part of Israel; East Jerusalem is considered occupied with its status “still to be determined in permanent status negotiations between the parties….We recognize no sovereignty over the city;” The phrase “Arab East Jerusalem” is avoided; so is any mention that Israeli settlements encroach on it and aim to annex it entirely; Palestinians want the city for their capital; it belongs to them; Israel won’t allow it; BBC won’t explain it;

— Gaza – Israel nominally disengaged in summer 2005; in fact, it never did; it merely redeployed its forces, and maintains rigid control over the territory’s land, coast and airspace; it invades and attacks at will and maintains a brutish mediaeval siege; all movement in and out of Gaza is restricted; so are Gazans’ access to food, water, health care, fuel, electricity and other life essentials; the result is a deep humanitarian crisis; BBC ignores it; instead it merely refers to an “end to Israel’s permanent military presence,” not an end to its occupation, repression, continued incursions, mass killings, targeted assassinations, and systemic use of torture;

— The Green Line – it separates Israel from the West Bank, but BBC reporting blurs it; it doesn’t call it a border because that implies internationally recognized status; instead it fudges by calling it “the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank;”

— Intifada – more fudging when referring to causes; value judgments are avoided; so is truth; don’t say Ariel Sharon’s September 29, 2000 Haram al-Sharif provocation incited a popular uprising; package his visit with Palestinian frustration over a failed peace process and say it “sparked the (second) intifada (rather than it) led (to it or) started (it);”

— Jewish – distinguish between “Israeli” or “Jewish” to avoid religious or racial connotations; stress political ones instead; ignore how Israelis stress Jewishness by relating to “the promised land,” one “without people for a people without a land,” a Jewish homeland, Israel’s biblical connection, and raising the issue of anti-semitism against harsh Israeli critics; when they’re Jewish call them self-hating;

— Occupied Territories or Occupation – BBC refers to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, not the Golan Heights; after Israel “disengaged,” Gaza is in political limbo; BBC distinguishes between the “occupied territories” and Palestinian Land or Palestinian Territories; calling Gaza and the West Bank “disputed territories” is preferred; in fact, there’s no dispute; they’re both Israeli occupied Palestinian land;

— settlements and outposts – BBC distinguishes between them when, in fact, they vary only in size; BBC avoids calling them illegal; they’re all illegal but adjectives aren’t used unless they’re vital to a story; in all reports, BBC is one-sided; it stresses that Israel disputes international law; anti-Israeli value judgments aren’t made; the rule of law is dismissed; Palestinian rights are ignored; the growing number of Israeli settlers is fudged, downplayed and generally not mentioned;

— Palestine – BBC acknowledges that no independent state exists but the “peace process” aims to create one; unmentioned is that negotiations are fake and their reports try to hide it; so do deceptive words to appease pro-Israel critics; BBC obliges them;

— “relative calm” or “quiet” periods – it refers to quiescent Palestinian resistance, no Israeli deaths, but not ongoing Israeli attacks and killings;

— right of return – BBC ignores international law and UN Resolution 194; it promotes the Israeli position instead; and

— “terrorists” – a loaded term applying only to Palestinians; never Israelis; most often other words are used like “bomber, attacker, gunman, kidnapper, insurgent (or) militant;” Palestinian self-defense is never called resistance, and Israeli incursions aren’t ever called aggression.

Media “Rules of Engagement” in Covering the Middle East

In June 2002, Robin Miller listed “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement.” BBC’s Israeli-Palestinian coverage adheres to them rigidly:

Rule 1 – “View the Middle East (ME) through Israeli eyes;” Palestinians are terrorists and aggressors; Israelis are victims who retaliate; self-defense is their motive; so is avoiding the truth;

Rule 2 – “Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as (truthful) hard news;” avoid any information that contradicts them;

Rule 3 – “Ignore the historical context;” avoid mentioning six decades of dispossession, occupation, and hundreds of preceding years during which Palestine was the Palestinian homeland; also suppress the idea that a Jewish homeland first originated with Zionism’s late 19th century’s founding and didn’t exist prior to that;

Rule 4 – “Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation;” say nothing about Geneva, UN Resolution 194, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and all other recognized international human rights laws;

Rule 5 – “Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis;” this rule is ironclad and unforgiving; open debate isn’t tolerated; facts are suppressed; aggressors are called victims; self-defense is called terrorism; news is carefully “filtered,” minds manipulated, and truth conspicuously absent; BBC excels at it and lets Israel get away with murder;

Rule 6 – “Muddy the waters when necessary;” major US media do it; so do human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; they tread lightly on Israeli-Palestinian issues and slant their views accordingly; so does BBC;

Rule 7 – “Credit all Israeli claims (as fact), even if wholly unfounded;” if Israelis say it, it’s true; BBC approves;

Rule 8 – “Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident;” if Palestinians say it, it’s false or at best an unsubstantiated claim; most often ignore, downplay or fudge it;

Rule 9 – “Condemn only Palestinian violence;” treat it as a crime against innocent Israeli victims; ignore any reference to self-defense against Israeli aggression and rule of law violations; and

Rule 10 – “Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights;” better still – ignore it or condemn it as biased or anti-semitic.

Add one more rule for good measure. Repeat any lie often enough and most people will believe it. It’s foolproof and works every time.

Independent Analysis of BBC’s Israel – Palestine Coverage

In 2005, the BBC commissioned a study to review the impartiality of its Israeli – Palestinian coverage. It consisted of an independent panel, the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University, and British – Israeli international lawyer Noam Lubell.

Their published April 2006 findings weren’t what the broadcaster wished. Highlights from them showed BBC coverage:

— rarely covered daily Palestinian hardships and repression under occupation;

— was incomplete, misleading, and failed to consistently provide a full and fair account of the conflict;

— overlooked important themes; in the study period it most notably ignored Israeli annexation of land in and around East Jerusalem;

— omitted a substantial amount of important news vital to Palestinian concerns;

— failed to convey the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience; specifically that one side is dominant and the other under occupation and forced to endure dependence indignities and hard line repression;

— seldom used the term occupation; mentioned military occupation only once during the study period;

— reported nothing about nearly four decades of occupation and repression;

— misportrayed Israel’s Gaza disengagement as a positive step; failed to clarify it as a ruse and that Gaza remains occupied, invaded and attacked at will;

— failed to report Israeli assertions that relocating Gaza settlers would strengthen Israel’s control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem;

— never clarified that Gaza settlements were illegal; that Gazans face ongoing hardships and stressed instead the “controversy” of withdrawing among Israelis;

— misused or misportrayed the term “terrorism” and only applied it to Palestinians;

— omitted any reference to historical background and failed to put stories in proper context;

— provided inadequate analysis and interpretation of key events and issues;

— failed to explain the meaning of Zionism;

— failed to provide background of the 1967 and 1973 wars;

— consistently misportrayed Hamas; described it as formally committed to Israel’s destruction; ignored Hamas’ acceptance of the Arab peace proposal and its willingness to recognize Israel in return for an end to the occupation;

— mischaracterized the Oslo Accords as positive; ignored its deficiencies and betrayal;

— mentioned the Intifada with no explanation of cause or justification;

— failed to cite international law and UN resolutions; their call for an end to Israel’s occupation; and the fact that Israel ignores international rulings contrary to its interests;

— ignored Palestinians’ legal right to return or restitution if they choose not to;

— ignored humanitarian and human rights laws;

— failed to explain extrajudicial executions are illegal;

— mischaracterized the Separation Wall that the World Court ruled illegal;

— misrepresented the status of Jerusalem;

— gave unequal access to Israeli officials and spokespersons; stations none of its correspondents in Occupied Palestine; has them all inside Israel; results in a huge disparity in reports favoring Israel while disparaging Palestinians;

— misportrayed Israelis as peace-seeking and Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as aggressors;

— stressed Israeli victimhood, the importance of Israeli deaths and injuries, and relative unimportance of a disproportionate number of Palestinian ones;

— responded to criticism defensively; continued to repeat past errors cited; showed deference to Israeli issues and the pro-Israeli Lobby;

— ignored its own established editorial standards, including on terminology; as a result, consistently showed bias, a lack of clarity and precision and did little to improve comprehension and understanding;

— overall – BBC falls far short of fair and impartial reporting and has done little to redress pointed out deficiencies; one positive note – the analysis found no evidence linking anti-Semitic behavior to BBC reports; it also found none dispelling it.

Glasgow University Media Group Study of Middle East News Coverage – It’s “Bad News from Israel” and BBC

Researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry conducted the study between 2000 and 2002, and their above quoted 2004 book title discusses it. Little has changed from then to now, BBC’s reporting highlights it, and it’s “bad news” for kept-in-the-dark viewers of major UK news and current affairs coverage.

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn agrees and explained in his unsparing comments about his former employer. He called it “dishonest – in concept, approach and execution….(it) favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa.” It depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as a battle of two (equal) forces (with equally) right and wrong responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.” As the UK and world’s leading broadcaster, BBC is justifiably blamed.

“Bad News from Israel” explains how – by consistently showing pro-Israel bias in virtually all its reporting and at times in the extreme. Beyond the book’s timeline, correspondent Chris Morris’ January 2004 “Lost hope in Mid-East conflict” report is a case in point. It’s about an expectant Palestinian woman confronted at a checkpoint. Prevented from passing, she gives birth and miscarries.

Morris is sympathetic but sides with the soldiers.

“You can’t blame (them, he says) for being jumpy at checkpoints….because there are Israeli victims too, children among them, killed by snipers and suicide bombers from the West Bank. What would you have done?

Would you have taken the risk? Or would you have played it safe, fearful of a trap? And so it goes on – another week in the Middle East.”

Even worse, the greater issue is ignored – an instance reflecting daily life in Occupied Palestine plus regular killings and abuse. Morris turns a blind eye.

He highlights suicide bombings instead – “A Palestinian mother in her early 20s blows herself to bits and takes the lives of four young Israelis, after tricking them into believing she was ill.” He continues – “A Jewish settler is killed on the West Bank, leaving five children without a father, including triplets just three months old.” Reports like his are commonplace on BBC. Israeli lives matter.

Palestinian ones don’t. Philo and Berry document the evidence.

Their study covers what media should report, a content analysis of their coverage, and how focus group interviews show how viewers are ill-served and left uninformed. Below are some results that apply to today:

— little or no historical context was provided; origins of the conflict were omitted; in the 2000 timeframe covered, BBC (and ITN) devoted 3500 lines of text to the Intifada, but a scant 17 to context or history;

— reporting consistently was pro-Israel and justified the most extreme actions and lawlessness; at the same time, Palestinian resistance was highlighted and condemned as terrorism;

— in the authors’ words: “There (was) no evidence from our analysis to suggest that Palestinian views were given preferential treatment on the BBC. The opposite (was) in reality the case;”

— BBC justified Israeli violence as “response” or “retaliation;” in contrast, Palestinian resistance was called “horrific,” an “atrocity,” “terrorism,” or even “mass murder;”

— some BBC reports were rife with errors whether intentionally or from ignorance;

— reports focused on Israeli security and right to exist; comparable Palestinian rights got little mention; nor did their impoverishment, deplorable daily existence, or a brutish four-decade military occupation;

— Israeli deaths were highlighted; Palestinian ones played down or ignored; regular Israeli incursions got little mention or weren’t reported;

— as a result, only 4% of focus group respondents knew Palestinians were driven from their homeland; only 10% that Israel occupied Palestine; some believed Palestinians were the occupiers; some viewed the conflict as a border dispute; 80% didn’t know the origin of Palestinian refugees or that they were dispossessed; two-thirds didn’t know Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones; more knowledgeable respondents had access to books and other material that dispel BBC bias and inaccuracies;

— senior BBC journalists interviewed told researchers that they were instructed not to give explanations; to dumb-down the news for easy listening and do it in “20-second attention span” segments; researchers believe BBC has it backwards; this type reporting alienates viewers; accuracy and more context enhances viewership; under heavy Israeli Lobby pressure, BBC and other major media report propaganda; truth is the first casualty, and viewers remain uninformed; today it’s worse than ever.

BBC’s Coverage of Gaza Under Siege

BBC reports little about Gaza under siege and the humanitarian crisis it caused. Instead, accounts like its January 2008 one are common. It’s headlined “Gaza’s rocket threat to Israel” and highlights homemade Qassams “fired by Hamas and other Palestinian militants at Israeli population centres near the Gaza Strip.” They’ve “killed 13 people inside Israel, including three children. In some months, more than 100 launches have been recorded by the Israelis.”

No mention is made of Israeli incursions, their frequency, the use of F-16 air-to-surface missiles, their accuracy and destructive power, high-tech battle tanks in civilian neighborhoods, and other sophisticated weapons freely used, including illegal ones. Nor is there mention of hundreds of Palestinian deaths, injuries, inflicted Israeli destruction, and use of Palestinians as human shields. Instead, the Israeli town of Sderot is highlighted because it’s “the only large Israeli population centre within the original Qassam’s range.” BBC describes them in detail to over-hype their destructive potential. In fact, they’re crude, inaccurate and limited in range. They hardly compare to Israel’s high-tech weapons that when unleashed against a civilian population are devastating.

Later in BBC’s report, it admits “Qassams are very primitive missiles and their main effect on Israelis in the area is psychological torment (and that) Israeli casualties have been relatively light.” In contrast, Israeli attacks on Palestinians kill and injure many hundreds and inflict immense psychological terror against a civilian population. It’s gone on for six decades, shows no signs of ebbing, but BBC won’t explain it.

Nor does it report on Gaza under siege, the collective punishment of its people, the humanitarian crisis it caused, and Israel’s lawless act that BBC should expose and denounce. Instead it features reports like a May 10 one about a “Gaza mortar attack kill(ing an) Israeli.” Israeli air strikes followed, five Hamas members were killed and four others injured. BBC featured an Israeli government spokesperson saying “We hold (Hamas) accountable for today’s attack and the murder of civilians.” No Palestinian response was aired, and BBC merely ended saying that “The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since last June when they ousted their rivals from the Fatah movement.” No context, no background, no fair and impartial reporting, no truth, and no possible way for viewers to understand.

BBC suggests that Palestinians are responsible for their own condition, that a humanitarian catastrophe is their fault, and that Israel has every right to terrorize and starve them to submission for its own security and self-interest. By BBC’s standards, Israel may rightfully lock down 1.5 million people, collectively punish them, continue a repressive occupation, and refuse to negotiate in good faith, or at all. BBC is dismissive. Palestinian suffering is inconsequential, yet consider its outrage from a single Israeli death. It’s also contemptuous of Hamas, ignored its months-long unilateral ceasefire, and refuses to report its willingness to recognize Israel in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders.

BBC views the conflict from an Israeli perspective. It features government officials to explain it, and reports whatever they say as fact. This turns reality on its head, makes lawless actions justifiable, results in double standard journalism, and lets Palestinians suffer the consequences. Why not and who cares. They’re just Arab Muslims in the land of Israel where Jews alone matter and not a hint of even-handed reporting exists. Now more than ever in the conflict’s seventh decade, and BBC’s reporting exacerbates it.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com

Behind the BBC's Good News from Basra

Ellie Keen — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:43:35 +0000

The Today programme’s reporting of the assault on Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City by the Iraqi government, backed by US and British troops, tanks and warplanes, has descended to the base assertion that our side is good, their side is bad.

Evan Davis, Today’s new presenter, introduced a section on Basra on May 2 which opened with an resident of Basra describing Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “very ill-educated, basically criminals” and welcoming the renewed invasion by western forces. Davis then turned to Major General Barney White-Spunner, the UK’s senior officer in Iraq: “So it sounds like fairly good news from Basra?”

“That’s certainly our view,” White-Spunner replied. Davis pressed for more good news: “Are the gains sustainable, I suppose is the question isn’t it? Or do you think if you don’t get to mend the sewers very well people are going to become discontented again and we’ll start getting back to more street disorder?”

White-Spunner took his cue and talked unchallenged about the “excellent work” UK troops were doing, about “development”, “aid distribution”, “humanitarian work”, “sensitivity” to local needs and so on. The interview was almost as cosy as editorial meetings of The Field magazine or Baily’s Hunting Directory, where White-Spunner works when not occupying foreign lands.

Meanwhile, Iraqi government troops were parading the bodies of dead Mahdi fighters like trophies and beating up prisoners. On the same day as White-Spunner’s Radio 4 interview a huge crowd of Shia Muslims protested against Iraq’s US-backed prime minister al-Maliki in Baghdad’s Sadr City, urging him to end the bloody confrontation with the Mahdi Army.

The British media routinely portrays supporters of Moqtada Sadr as “militia”, “extremists”, “men in black”, “rogue gunmen” and “death squads”. Yet, up until last September, Moqtada Sadr’s group was part of the Iraqi government. The US offensive has relied heavily on the Iran-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, many members of the armed wing of which, the Badr Organisation, have been battling the Sadr-led resistance.

The US demonises the Mahdi Army because Sadr is resolutely opposed to the occupation. Moreover, many Shia view the Mahdi in part as a charitable organisation and are often grateful for the security it provides. Sadr’s organisation gives money to families of Shia dead and injured, resettles displaced families and offers funds for any victim of American weapons in Sadr City. Evoking comparisons with Hezbollah, Sadr’s movement “has established itself as the main service provider in the country,” says a recent report by Refugees International. Every month the Mahdi army distributes rations of rice, cooking oil, sugar, tea and other staples, much of it provided by the Iraqi Red Crescent, to thousands of Baghdad’s poorest families.

As the Financial Times put it last month, the clashes between the government and the Mahdi army reveal a class division at the heart of the Shia community. Sadr represents the angry, dispossessed Shia masses of Iraq who suffered under Saddam. “What we’ve seen over the past few weeks is a real class struggle open up with no political means for bridging the gap,” the International Crisis Group told the FT. “Sadr’s followers don’t care if he’s an ayatollah or not. They just want him to win for them the wealth and prosperity they feel should be theirs,” a US official told the paper.

The British media’s last line of attack is that British troops are defending women’s rights. But abuse of women was widespread in Basra before the British were driven out of the city last autumn. The US-backed government has brought right-wing Islamists to power, unleashing attacks against women.

The resistance in battling the occupation. But for the BBC’s flagship news programme our boys are just doing good, building sewers and helping reconstruction. This is far from the case – the British and US armies are building a sewer of bloodshed and sectarian hatred in Iraq.